JANUARY 19, 2010, 1:59 PM – VALVE – GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENT
BioShock 2 is now available for pre-purchase on Steam! Save 10% and earn an extra copy of BioShock free! If you already own BioShock then gift it to any of your friends! Want to play with a few of your friends? The BioShock 2 Four Pack gives you four copies of BioShock 2 and four free copies of BioShock to give out to your friends!
However, the price for Australia in Steam appears to be substantially higher, $27 USD higher… Using the two links below show two different prices, and unfortunately unless you have a US billing address, you wont be able to use the US store page.
Suggestions for getting the lower price range from illegal to legal, however probably the easiest legal method is to just get it gifted from someone in America then pay them back via PayPal.
Shadow | Games, Steam | Thursday, November 19th, 2009
The other day I was listening to some music from BioShock (one of my all time favourite games), “Cohen’s Masterpiece”.
Below is video from YouTube of the song played piano
You can also view the scene from BioShock involving “Young Fitzpatrick” and Cohen’s masterpiece in the following video
I thought it would be interesting to source the sheet music and take a look at it. My favourite parts are from bars 4 through 7 (0:12 – ~0:25 in the topmost video), and the similar variations of that segment throughout the rest of the piece.
The pictures below are the three pages that make up the manuscript.
Shadow | Games, Steam | Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Launch Time
One of the latest most anticipated releases on Steam seems to have missed its launch date. Déjà vu anyone?
The Steam Forums and Steam community are responding sluggishly to requests, most likely bursting at the seams from the influx of gamers that want to get their hands dirty and start playing…
Most users attempting to access the Steam Community site are being presented with a ‘Down for Maintenance’ message, pictured below.
Personally, I am not to fussed if the deadlines aren’t met down to the second — managing the release of a game across millions of computers worldwide isn’t an easy feat. So Valve, take your time, just ignore the barrage of insults and gamer rage… In the mean time gamers, visit the stats page to view the new in-game achievements and various records statistics.
UPDATE (+ 15 Minutes)
Having blocked comments on the event page (most likely to reduce server load), gamers can now no longer leave their insulting comments.. which is probably a good thing… This has allowed people to once again, gain access to Steam community.
UPDATE (+ 1 Hour)
An hour passed the launch time and L4D2 is finally showing signs of being released. The Steam store page has been revamped and a new post has made it onto the L4D blog site. Maybe daylight savings had something do with it
UPDATE (+1 Hour 15 Minutes)
Users are now able to decrypt game files Happy Gaming!
I was walking down the street When out the corner of my eye, I saw a pretty little thing approaching me. She said I never seen a man, Who looks so all alone, Could you use a little company? If you could pay the right price, Your evening will be nice, Or you can go and send me on my way, I said you’re such a sweet young thing, Why’d you do this to yourself? She looked at me and this is what she said.
Oh, there ain’t no rest for the wicked, Money don’t grow on trees, I got bills to pay, I got mouths to feed, There ain’t nothing in this world for free. I know I can’t slow down, I can’t hold back Though you know I wish I could, Oh no there ain’t no rest for the wicked, Until we close our eyes for good.
Not even 15 minutes later, I’m still walking down the street, When I saw the shadow of a man creep out of sight, And then he swept up from behind, Put a gun up to my head, He made it clear he wasn’t looking for a fight, He said give me all you’ve got, I want your money not your life, If you try to make a move I wont think twice, I told him you can have my cash, But first you know I’ve got to ask, What made you want to live this kind of life?
He said there ain’t no rest for the wicked, Money don’t grow on trees, I got bills to pay I got mouths to feed Ain’t nothing in this world for free. I know I can’t slow down, I can’t hold back Though you know I wish I could Oh no there ain’t no rest for the wicked, Until we close our eyes for good.
Now a couple hours past, And I was sitting in my house, The day was winding down and coming to an end, So I turned on the TV, And flipped it over to the news, And what I saw I almost couldn’t comprehend, I saw a preacher man in cuffs Taking money from the church, He stuffed his bank account with righteous dollar bills But even still I can’t say much Because I know were all the same, Oh yes we all seek out to satisfy those thrills.
You know there ain’t no rest for the wicked, Money don’t grow on trees, We got bills to pay We got mouths to feed Ain’t nothing in this world for free. Oh no We can’t slow down, We can’t hold back Though you know we wish we could. You know there ain’t no rest for the wicked, Until we close our eyes for good.
Oh Lord (oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord)… Oh Lord Oh boy, oh well I told you Well I told you, but I thought you’d know There ain’t no heaven Oh Lord, there ain’t no heaven There ain’t no heaven On the county road
Don’t talk about it Oh boy, don’t talk about it Don’t talk about it If you do, I’ll cry Don’t come around me Oh Lord, don’t come around me Don’t come around me If you do, I’ll die
Oh Lord (oh Lord), there ain’t no heaven Oh Lord (oh Lord), there ain’t no heaven
Down at the station stood my dear ol’ mother Oh well she keep on, keep on screamin’ and a-cryin’ “Oh Lord, I wonder what my son has done”
Oh Lord (oh Lord), there ain’t no heaven Oh Lord (oh Lord), there ain’t no heaven
Oh Lord (oh Lord)…
Ah Did you bring me, bring me any silver? (silver, silver…) Oh did you bring me, bring me any gold? (any gold, gold…) Oh did you see me, workin’ on South Carolina Oh just to see me work on the county road?
Oh Lord (oh Lord), there ain’t no heaven Oh Lord (oh Lord), there ain’t no heaven
(Oh Lord, oh Lord)
Oh Lord (oh Lord) There ain’t no heaven (there ain’t no heaven) (Oh lord, there ain’t no heaven) Oh lord (oh lord), there ain’t no heaven
While Google Picasa Web Albums has had facial recognition in-built for a while now, I knew it wouldn’t be too much longer before the Picasa desktop software was also updated with that feature.
Google finally released the long awaited, facial recognition update for Picasa (Google’s version of photo editing software), to version 3.5.
Along with this update comes the aforementioned facial recognition capabilities; the ability to have faces automatically recognized and identified in the photos you take. This lets you sort photos by who is in them as opposed to tags or file names. Don’t be alarmed; the results arn’t sent to some central facial recognition database! It’s kept purely on your computer for your benefit of photo classification.
Now to how TF2 comes into the picture (pun intended ). So, being an avid gamer, and having an online Game Photo Album, I tend to take a lot of in-game screenshots, which I organize through Picasa. So, Picasa begins scanning for ‘faces’ … and low and behold, the characters in the games are being identified! I found this quite amusing
And so, while the scanning is only at 10%, I have played Medic class at least 46 times… The engineer with the two different poses (on the right) wasn’t picked up as the engineer; but I soon added both the photos under his name.
Interestingly, the 46 Medic photos were all of the same face pose. This was because they were from all the final scoreboard screenshots; an option in TF2 to always take a screenshot of the final match scores.
And the time it has taken me so far to write this post has allowed Picasa to reach 16% of the way through scanning my photo collection. The engineer category now provides substantially more entertaining results
Released mid-Feburary of last year (2008), Audiosurf is still one of the most popular games which utilizes the music as the ‘track’, using the song as the soul of the game.
For only $10 this game is great way to enjoy your music collection; pushing the boundaries of a new musical experience — immersed within a rich 3d (almost psychedelic) environment. You will find some of yours song produce much more relaxed ‘tracks’ to play on, while some louder rock tracks will provide you quite a challenge…
It is on that aspect that I propose to music stores to add a new criteria to online song purchases… an Audiosurf rating, ASR for short. While some websites list some of the ‘best’, none actually let you purchase the track and find try it out yourself. A dedicated website should be set up to associate these ratings with songs. Online music stores can use an API to obtain the latest ranking (possible a star based system) for a song in particular — an average of tracks could provide a album ranking. For example, the “Windows XP Setup Sound” (played during the initial setting up of your computer) is actually not a bad Audiosurf track compared to some others I have tried… Although I doubt a music store would be able to sell such a song; it would at least give people the opportunity to try out great Audiosurf rides.
Anyway… I’m heading back to my song now that I’ve posted my thoughts of the day. You can read more about Audiosurf here or on the game’s website, www.audio-surf.com.
Steam had some connection and networking issues today after about 750,000 users were disconnected and over 1 million users lost access to the friends services provided by Steam Community.
The connection went down at 2:15 am (GMT -8) with no reports or updates until after the issue had been resolved, about 2 hours later. The following is taken from the Steam forum thread describing the downtime issue:
Sorry for the inconvenience, we had a networking issue that was affecting about 1/8th of our users. The problem should be resolved now.
The problem wasn’t detected and fixed as quickly as it should have been due to some monitoring systems failing, we’ll be taking steps to ensure that doesn’t happen in the future.
The interesting this is that ‘jmccaskey’ says the issue only affected 1/8th users however the stats graph on Valve’s/Steam’s website says otherwise. The screenshot above clearly shows that no users whatsoever were online during the downtime.
Either way, its back online now and connection has been restored. Game time!
During the advertisement on TV I noticed something a little odd, the logo as seen in the picture below is a replica of the Aperture Laboratories logo from Valve’s Portal. I know apertures + photography + models makes sense but I thought it was an interesting coincidence that both companies represented ‘Aperture’ with the same design.
I’m not announcing a conspiracy or anything, although I should really warn any contestants on their show – they may be in for a enrichment centre special. I knew GLaDOS was behind Channel 7. It made me laugh =D.
You would think they would have learnt the first time.
I dislike being nasty towards Valve, especially when they did originally create Team Fortress and the Orange Box to be a milestone in gaming history. However, you would expect them to put some thought into how releasing their ‘Team Fortress Achievement Packs’ may affect game play for the rest of the world.
As posted previously I described how the Medic achievement pack affected game play on all servers, influencing the player’s choice of class to create, saturating a team with Medics unbalancing the game and creating strategy problems. The exact same has happened with the Pyro achievement pack. Since its release, players are choosing to be Pyro over any other class regardless of the 10 that are already distributed throughout the same server.
This is just one problem. Many other factors contribute to and amplify it. This is something Valve failed to take into consideration when releasing achievement packs. One significant factor is the release new ‘weapons’ for just a single class. This just creates an unbalanced game. Why should someone who ‘grinded’ the achievements and obtain all the new weaponry (in most cases considerably stronger than its predecessors) always dominate and win against those who prefer to gain achievements genuinely? It is an unfair advantage that should have been noticed by Valve after they released the Medic’s achievement packs.
You would think that the choices Valve have made for Team Fortress 2 have already affected the game enough however they also decided a ‘Free Team Fortress 2 Weekend’. Oh, this just makes my day. Now the servers are full of Pyros with overpowered weapons, and with all newbie’s controlling them. Thank god I will only have to endure the newbie problem for a weekend.
The Solution: I’m not going to say how stupid Valve’s decisions are and then not provide any plausible solutions to this madness. To begin, it’s not like Team Fortress 2 Achievements have never existed before, just take the example of when the game was first released. There were 17 achievements which did not affect game balancing. The achievements although requiring you to be a certain class in some situations, all had something in common. There was an achievement for all classes. Not a pack of about 30 achievements for one class. That is the point that Valve missed completely when designing these new achievements packs. The achievements should be released progressively for all classes. This creates an even distribution of classes throughout servers keeping the game in balance and experienced players happy at the same time.
As for the new weapons, it would be more appropriate to ensure that all players are on an even footing. New weapons should be released progressively like the achievements. If for example, five achievements were released at one time for each class and then rewarded with a weapon unlock at the end of each five achievement milestone, it would ensure a much more even game play. Each weapon of course would need to be balanced in strengths and weaknesses to maintain equilibrium between the experienced and the not so experienced. Previously Team Fortress 2 exemplified this quality before the achievement pack updates.
Hopefully Valve will see the problems they are creating after this latest release. Meanwhile, the Pyro ‘achievement hype’ will continue for a few weeks – I will need to find another game in the meantime.
Happy Gaming!
). So, being an avid gamer, and having an online 
